National Institute for Transportation and Communities

Alex Bigazzi, a 2014 NITC dissertation fellow and graduate of Portland State University's Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. program, has published a paper based on his NITC-funded research in Environmental Science & Technology, a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

See ACS coverage of the project here.

Bigazzi's research evaluates the concentration of air pollution encountered by cyclists in Portland, Oregon.

In the study, volunteer research subjects rode bicycles equipped with instruments to collect high-resolution bicycle, rider, traffic and environmental data.

Participants rode a variety of routes including bicycle lanes on primary and secondary arterials, bicycle boulevards, off-street paths and mixed-use roadways. They were told to ride at a pace and exertion level typical for utilitarian travel, and breath biomarkers were used to record the amount of traffic-related pollution present in each cyclist’s exhalations. 

This research was the focus of Bigazzi's dissertation, Bicyclists’ Uptake of Traffic-Related Air Pollution: Effects of the Urban Transportation System, published by NITC in December 2014. It was related to an earlier project...

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Andrew Dannenberg, MD, MPH, is an Affiliate Professor in environmental health and in urban design and planning at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he teaches interdisciplinary courses on health impact assessment and on healthy community design.  He is also a consultant to and former Team Lead of the Healthy Community Design Initiative at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he works on activities related to examining the health aspects of community design with a special focus on the use of health impact assessment. Previously he served as Director of CDC’s Division of Applied Public Health Training, as Preventive Medicine Residency director and as an injury prevention epidemiologist on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, and as a cardiovascular epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.  Dr. Dannenberg received an MD from Stanford University and an MPH from Johns Hopkins University, and completed a family medicine residency at the Medical University of South Carolina.  With Drs. Howard Frumkin and Richard Jackson, he recently published a book on healthy community design entitled Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, and Sustainability (Island Press, 2011, www.makinghealthyplaces.com).

The video begins at 3:14.

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Abstract: As part of Clark County Public Health’s Planning Active Walkable Neighborhoods project, a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) was conducted on the county’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan.  A rapid HIA was completed to provide input on the draft plan, and a subsequent comprehensive HIA was designed to evaluate the impacts of final proposals. This presentation will provide an overview of the process and results of the HIA, examine lessons learned, and discuss transferability to other jurisdictions or projects.

The video begins at 3:49.

Access the flyer here.

GPS use in travel behavior studies has seen increasing acceptance over the past decade, with more than 15 travel surveys conducted since 2000 including a GPS subcomponent. Similarly, accelerometers have become the gold standard for collecting objective physical activity data in health studies. Since 2003, GeoStats has been involved in studies that have deployed both devices in tandem to collect second-by-second travel and physical activity data never before available. This seminar will cover the use of these technologies to address key research questions facing transportation and health professionals.

Dr. Jean Wolf is the president and co-founder of GeoStats, a company specializing in the application of GPS and GIS technologies for the collection, analysis, visualization, and reporting of transportation data. Since the launch of GeoStats in 2000, Dr. Wolf has led all GPS-enhanced travel surveys and physical activity studies conducted by the firm (with more than 20 studies to date). Dr. Wolf has extensive project management, technology, and logistics experience, including 10 years at UPS as an industrial and systems engineer, which makes her uniquely qualified to run complex GPS studies that depend upon the integration of...